Peter Jackson briefly spoke about the titular battle that takes place towards the climax of THE HOBBIT: THE BATTLE OF THE FIVE ARMIES last month, but now he's given us a little bit more to chew on. First off is the fact it's been suggested this battle will take up 20-25 minutes of screen time during the film. While that may not seem like a lot, it's been reported that this will be the shortest of all the Middle Earth films, clocking in at 144 minutes. Take away the end credits and that means we wont be sitting nearly as long as we did during RETURN OF THE KING, waiting for things to come to a close.
Peter Jackson on "discovering" the final battle:
[One] of the things we did with the Battle of the Five Armies in particular, and in designing the script and the narrative, is that we made sure that the story that we're telling in this third movie, that the story is continuing through the battle. So in other words, you don't get the story to a point where everyone's suddenly, 'Oh, stop, we're going to launch into a huge battle now,' and then the battle's over and you do a denouement in the end. We actually have a lot of conflict happening between characters, we have people in different places that are needing to get to each other… And some of it's not all battle-related, some of it is personal stuff that's there. And so we kind of pushed the story where the battle kind of interrupts the story, it gets in the way of the story, but the story kind of punches its way through the battle, and that's what we've deliberately tried to do with this. So you're literally seeing it through the eyes of multiple characters as they are still doing what they need to do to fulfill their journey on the movie.
You can check out a little bit more of what PJ had to say here. Frankly, I would have loved to have seen only two Hobbit films no greater than 2 hours, but at least the third installment should run at a brisker pace. It's odd that anyone would refer to 144 minutes as brisk, but when you're dealing with Middle Earth, it's an investment! Here's hoping our time invested pays off this December.
THE HOBBIT: THE BATTLE OF THE FIVE ARMIES will take place on December 17.